Under the basement light and its regular rumour of brightness, Maz stands by the side wall with her back turned to a desk that carries towers of cardboard boxes.
She leans her hip against the edge. The heels of her hands land on the fringe of the desk, her fingers curling into her palm.
He’s not even going to mention it again, is he? You’re not just going to stand here and say nothing about it.
“Well…?” Her eyes follow Eli’s boots as he steps towards the filing cabinet opposite her.
“Are we still not speaking?” She starts pushing the desk along the wall. As its metal legs drag across the stone floor in slow screeches, a chalkboard that hangs behind it begins to reveal itself.
Eli stops and turns to her.
“What do you mean?”
“You tell me. You’re the one who stormed off.”
“What? That wasn’t–” He tips his chin up.
“I don’t storm off.”
Does she mean this morning? I’ll try to move it on.
“Ha.” Meg’s voice rings down from the top of the stairs.
“I leave you two alone for a minute, and you’re already faffing about.”
Eli tilts his head upwards, aiming his voice at Meg.
“We’re only discussing if, you know, we should sort the worst ones…” He looks at Maz.
“…later.”
Meg’s footsteps approach from above them, thump by thump.
“Define ‘worst’. Those that buzz off when you get near them or those that don’t?” The glow of her phone torch finds the basement’s stone floor.
Maz sighs before shouting towards the sound of Meg’s steps.
“Bit of both.”
Eli’s gaze slides past Maz, travelling the length of the desk that she still heaves backwards and further beyond it. He notices the loose papers on the floor, all piled to form a messy stack as the scratchy scraping of the desk creeps towards the heap.
“Stop.”
So she does.
“You telling me what to do now? Great. We’re doing this since when, exactly?”
He looks at her, but his attention slips again, this time to the chalkboard which the desk has exposed. It holds a large grid drawn in chalk, partly scrubbed off.
Right. I’ve seen this before. At least a version of it, and for some reason that might not be so obvious, I’m not surprised. Who thought this mess was a good enough table for any sort of data?
She follows his line of sight to the board.
What’s so important there? Oh, great. Numbers. And… names with… codes of… queues?
Eli leans his back against the cabinet. The cold metal presses its own grid of drawers in old pathways into his spine through his shirt.
V-12 after O-47? No. That’s not order. Nothing’s after ‘Overflow’. That’s obviously a double booking. No initials for Routing either. That queue will loop. What? What am I thinking about?
“Oh, silent treatment now?” Maz turns to him, shaking her head as her hand shoots into the air to vaguely wave in the board’s direction.
“The blackboard piqued your interest instead, didn’t it?”
“What? No, no. I didn’t even–” The lines on the board make his eyes try to correct their focus by the second take.
She springs herself forward from the desk and stomps off towards the stairs.
“Yep, good. I’ll leave you alone with the ghosts of chalk.”
“Hey.” His hand stretches out to the stair rail to block her way before he pulls himself up to stand by the bottom step in front of her.
“Things have been, as you might have noticed, only a bit weird these last few days, Maz. It’s fi–”
“Fine? Oh, no you don’t. Nope. That’s my go-to lie.” She tries to sidle past, but he matches her step, standing in her way with a slight smile trying to take shape on his face.
“I know. I know. Also… Not lying.” He holds the rail tighter.
“Okay. Firstly, don’t – I mean… it doesn’t matter what I mean. But… trust the process?”
Her brows bunch together as she opens her mouth only to utter nothing out of it.
Trust ‘what’– What is he not telling you? Maybe he had a bad memory jolt. What could be so bad as to not even mention it? Not that you haven’t seen enough of anything being strange. You still have no answers. You don’t know why you’re taking the spinachy things you keep calling ‘scales’.
“No. I’ve had enough.” She tries to push his arm aside.
Static buzzes under her touch. It jumps from his shirt to her hand, from her to him, and back again.
The snap follows, different from the ones they have felt before. This one surges past the need to cause any prickling. It spreads in minuscule pulses that tingle through to their arms, reaches their spines, and travels to their feet. Feeling as if the static has turned into an energised current, it keeps flowing between them. The floor beneath them may as well have become part of the circuit.
A crackle arises from the bulb overhead before it dies. It returns with a brighter glow that burns as white as a strip light that belongs in a marble room.
Maz looks at him, watching a pair of fine golden lines swirling inside his eyes.
You know this feeling. Wait… What’s going on with his eyes? Is it the light? No. You know this. It happened when you were…
Eli’s hand slides off the rail and finds her elbow instead. His gaze locks onto hers. Curving gold wisps spiral in her deep brown eyes. One spin at a time, they burst gilded speckles that thicken, attempt to eclipse the colour with a shine, and, every now and then, reach out towards him.
The light’s gone too white to do… that. Why is this not weird? Right. Of course. The board, the snap, the eyes… I was in…
***
I was in an office.
It was large enough to accommodate the marble table that could seat twenty people in the middle and still have the space to flail in an exasperated fit without ever touching the marble walls.
Slotted white boards lined those cold walls. I stood in front of one and looked at the slots where each held a glowing token.
“Merx, while you’re here…” I pointed at a token labelled with Q-A-155.
“You walked this one in, right? It’s in Routing now without a tag. Do we move it up for reconsideration or transfer it to Rebirth East?”
“Again, Eli.” Merx looked up from the table where Val had been leaning over a stack of forms, from the edge of her seat. He left Val’s side and shuffled towards me.
He arrived at the board in a series of half-steps and stood beside me, if you could call that standing. I never saw him be still for a hot second.
“If you push Q-A-anything up, it’ll push down the Q-Vs. If Q-Vs end up in the Valhalla overflow, you need to move at least a particular group of three drunk berserkers somewhere that’s not my corridor.”
His shoulders lowered in defeat.
“You can’t tell me you haven’t heard how they sing. If it were ever actually up to me, I’d throw them into The Pit, just for a bit, to make a grave-ish point about their constant out-of-tuneness. I’m pretty sure the potted plant is wilting because of them.”
“That’s–” My hand drew back from the board before Val cut in from the table.
“Nonsense. They howl for glory, and nothing wilts with that.”
I listened to her sorting forms. The shhff of the sliding sheet was followed by the flp of the turn, the clack of the stamp right after. It all ended with the tink of the arrival into the metal tray. Then the next form.
“Whole lot of complaints getting filed today. Just try to keep that one away from the V queue.” Val must have said that straight into the tray as her voice echoed a bit.
I felt my head throb before I pushed the Q-A token on the board behind another. That was a quieter line where I didn’t mind being myself.
The office door swung open, and Maz strode in.
***
Your eyes found Eli as you stepped into the sorting office.
“Ah, there you are.”
The folders under your arm were threatening to slide down if you stopped keeping them in a tight hug. So, a nod was surely enough to salute the room before turning back to Eli.
“Good. No. Bad. Well, not too urgent and slightly bad news. You’ve double-booked Pan.”
The speed Merx turned to you blew your fringe backwards, like he’d suddenly turned into a fan.
“Pan? Again? I moved him twice last week. He keeps showing up in corridors he’s not assigned to and playing things that aren’t on the schedule.”
You made your way towards Eli and Merx.
“He’s apparently now performing at three conditional absolutions and a choral punishment.” Your finger tapped on the tokens in their slots between them.
“He’ll ruin the choir and seduce the absolved.”
Eli looked towards the table.
“That’s not on my form.”
Nothing was ever on anyone’s form properly. You tugged out a file from a folder that nearly gave your chin a paper cut, turned, and laid it on the table beside the forms that had his jagged ‘E’ instead of a signature.
“This one will have to be.”
Val had a stamp. Not a pen. Merx had started to chew on his, so maybe not that one. Where were all the pens in this place? Oh, you had one behind your ear. You slid it out and leaned over the paper. Your eyes searched for the line on the page, and there it was with all its certainty, ‘PENDING – MUST PROCEED TO WAITING JUDGEMENT.’
You crossed out a letter and another one’s loop and fattened a different one until the sentence became ‘-ENDING – MOST PROCEED TO WASTING DODGEMENT.’
“Confusing – well, only more confusing enough for someone to think it over altogether.”
A bell sounded outside the office as Deon swung through the doorway with a wreath of grapevine in their hair, robe flung on as if stolen from a chaise. Glitter was clinging to their throat like pollen.
Oh, for the love of… They’d turn what you’ve done into a tidbit and let it travel faster than Merx. You wanted to hide your pen. But that would’ve looked suspicious so you started to spin it. There couldn’t have been anything suspicious about casually spinning a pen.
***
I didn’t get to read what Maz had written before Deon walked in.
They looked at me, then at the pen that was creaking with each spin in Maz’s hand.
“You two are still here.”
Their face seemed inclined to turn the fact into an accusation in their next blink.
“Orgy’s an hour old. Phrody’s already misplaced her girdle, and at least two new powers think you’ve abandoned them for paperwork.”
Maz slid out another page from her folders.
“We’ve got four hundred backlogged petitions and a riot in the reincarnation queue.”
Deon put a hand to their chest.
“Riot and party can co-exist. It’s called atmosphere.”
Their gaze hopped from our faces to the board, to the trail of altered words in Maz’s vandalising ink and the tokens I’d slotted into the quieter queues.
“When was your last hour off?”
I opened my mouth and realised I had no answer.
Maz gave them a blank look. That served as one.
“Unacceptable. You’re running this show more than those whose entire reason for being is meant for it. Look at you.” Deon grabbed both our hands before pulling us towards the table.
“We’re busy.” Maz’s attempt to pull her hand back didn’t have any heart in it, unless she, like me, was glad to be dragged away from a backlog that perpetually demanded attention.
“Not for the next three minutes.” Deon placed our hands together over the central ledger’s open blank pages and pressed their own down on top.
“Consider this a status update.”
Deon’s hand felt like it should be glowing as my skin prickled under the touch. The buzzing feeling travelled to where my hand met Maz’s. It spread to my arm and reached my spine.
The office started to seem even bigger than it was. Obviously, the walls didn’t move. The room I had for its entirety in my head deepened.
I could place every token without turning to the board. Beneath the tips of my fingers, I knew where each one already was. I suddenly knew where each one in the end was meant to go. I always guessed the gap between those two things to be way too wide for my liking, and, not to my surprise, there it was.
Q-A-155 was in the wrong slot. It was never supposed to be sent back in the queue. I really should’ve argued about that with Merx more. I never should’ve let it be. None of it mattered after the ledger.
I felt the token move behind me as it went to the slot I knew it belonged in. I hadn’t looked at the board, let alone reached for it. I hadn’t decided I should even do that. The deniable token assigning I’d been doing for longer than, obviously, longer than anyone here had bothered to track, wasn’t even done.
Practically, the ledger knew what came next as it started writing its own lines.
The words started appearing on the page. All had the same tiny lettering in dry ink as the rest that was logged. Millennia’s worth of moves had been written there, and none of them had needed a name. It had carried on writing, right up until the line ended with ‘Elysinth‘.
***
Your hand was in Eli’s. The feeling you had belonged to somewhere else. You might as well have been suddenly shoved between the ends of a snapped live wire where the current was still pouring through, and you were the break.
That must have been well past its shock point. It rushed through you with such explosive flow that you expected your skin to be, what, probably burning. You thought maybe that was the delusion and the part where you blacked out was near. None of that happened. All you really felt was relief, somehow.
It sounded like the corridor’s low noise outside had fallen into a silence that was unheard of since the last time the boss had got angry, as if every office and clerk out there had stopped to brace for impact, or your hearing had hidden itself under something. You looked up at Eli to check if he was feeling strange too.
His eyes had a pair of thin, stringy golden wisps moving inside them. You couldn’t tell if they were over or just under the hazel. Every time they turned, specks of gold erupted out of them and back into his eyes until they cast a gilded glow.
Maybe he was as confused as you, since his hand tightened around yours. Maybe he was… scared? No. The look he had was far beyond any fear or uncertainty.
The ledger warmed under your joined hands. You looked down. Your other hand was pointing your pen at the form you had tweaked earlier, the one where you’d bent ‘MUST PROCEED TO JUDGEMENT’ into something no clerk could read with a straight face.
Why did you have to do that? You knew what it should’ve said. Like you hadn’t always known, the forms were only chaos and who’s to say. You’d been who’s-to-say longer than you could count, and you could count a long way.
It never needed Pan involved for starters. You knew you should’ve simply changed it to something better. Something like ‘APPROVED – MUST PROCEED TO JUDGEMENT.’ That would’ve been the right thing to do since they’d been waiting too long already. As your fingers twitched in the direction of the words, they did exactly that.
The ledger took the change as it logged it on its page. The words wrote themselves along the margin. Margins. You’d always thought they were the safe part. Apparently not. The book didn’t stop writing until it signed for you. Mazmire.
Deon let our hands go and stood back to look at the pair of us as if we’d just washed up on shore, though that didn’t stop them from throwing their arms wide.
“Congratulations. History’s new favourite mistake-makers. You’ll do fine.”
***
Meg’s phone torch shoots its beam at Maz’s eye when she arrives at the bottom of the basement stairs.
Maz gasps, and it makes her lean back, but her hold stays on Eli’s arm. The breath that surges in through her mouth stings all the way down to her lungs.
That’s new. No. Of course it’s not. You weren’t–
Eli jolts backwards only to nearly stumble on the step.
Right. Stone. Not marble. Was that really me? Us? I… felt that.
Maz snaps her head to Meg’s boots when they stop on the step behind Eli.
You’re still feeling the, whatever it was, flowing. What did you just see? No way that actually happened. Maybe it did. That same buzz is still here. You do remember a reflection where your eyes were gold. Is this connected to the comments moving about too? Nope. Bad lighting and a janky app. You’re fine. What if it did happen?
Meg looks at Maz’s eyes that still keep their thin curls of gold spiralling. She lets out a low sigh as she passes them.
“You two… saw a ghost or something?” Her voice drops to a whisper and to almost nothing by the end.
Eli keeps his hold on Maz’s elbow.
“It’s–” he starts but the rest turns into dust when he turns his head to the grid drawn on the chalkboard.
‘The queue won’t fix itself.’ What if Jackal was right? If what I saw just now also happened–
The longer Eli stares, the clearer the lines on the board seem. His hand drops to his side as the V-12 cell wiggles in its place and begins to drag itself upwards to a slot above O-47.
Maz lets go of his arm, balling her hand into a fist. She gives the air between them a quick little tap, which verges on a tightly contained jab, before resting the flat of her knuckles on his chest.
Stupid body. Stupid brain. And all these stupid things. You’re good. He…
His heartbeat knocks against her skin just as hers thumps in her ears.
She snatches her hand back as she turns and heads to the desk.
What’s happening? You can’t even be angry and confused at the same time. Didn’t realise that was a luxury. You’re not done here. Ask him later.
Approaching the desk, her eye catches a box label. The printed text on it reads ‘ARCHIVE: TO BE DESTROYED’, yet her eyes insist it says ‘ARCHIVE: TO BE DISCUSSED.’ The letters don’t appear from anywhere new or disappear as the spacing changes. The loops and stems of the letters push against each other until the meaning leans the way she means for it.
She blinks on repeat for each syllable that arrives in her mind.
You know this. You’ve seen this. You remember this. You’ve done this before. The words moved because… that was what they should’ve meant. You probably had too much gone-off spinach. Don’t be silly.
“Nope,” she tells the label.
Eli steps closer to her.
“What is it?”
Meg drops onto a nearby desk, swinging her legs with speed. She eyes them both up and down.
“Dizzy again?”
“All good.” Maz turns her back to the box.
“Just feels like we’ve done this shift before.”
Eli looks at her, then at the chalkboard. His fingers itch. He moves nearer to the board and reaches for a stub of chalk on the ledge. A cell outline slides itself for a single line’s width along the surface before he touches the board. His hand follows it from a distance, and another line straightens. A third nudges into alignment with the grid.
He puts the chalk on its ledge.
I was going to do that. But… didn’t.
He takes half a step back as his glance whips from one edge of the board to the other.
It looks… correct now.
Meg’s phone drops to the floor.
Eli turns his face halfway towards the sound but stops, looking at the rear wall instead.
Maz catches sight of Eli in profile. The thin curl of gold resurfaces in his eye, finer now, moving more slowly. It thins further as he looks away from the wall, and when his eyes pass back over it, the curl thickens again.
She looks away.
Don’t ask. Not here.
Meg slides off the desk after her phone and picks it up to aim its light at the stairs.
Her voice comes out steadier than her torch beam.
“Really shouldn’t have–” She exhales long and soft.
“–left Ron to manage the coffees all by himself.” She charges up the stairs with her free hand reaching for her back pocket. Her footsteps land in rushed thumps as they recede.
Maz turns her head to see Eli’s already looking at her.
Ask him now. The office, the boards, the marble, all of it. Déjà vu, or have you just dreamt this before?
“How long have you known that things were in the wrong place?”
“Not long enough.” His eyes find the chalkboard again.
I know what I saw… and where everything goes. Why does it feel like it’s a bad thing now, though?
Maz comes to stand beside him.
“That wasn’t even the first time for any of this, was it?”
The sound of her pulse loudens in her ears, louder than Meg’s boots ever thumped on stone, loud as a circuit waiting on a switch, loud enough for her to see Eli’s lips move and never hear his voice.
“No.” He keeps his eyes on the board.
“It wasn’t.”
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